For a recent 3-day holiday, my wife and I went to Qingdao, China, in Shandong Province. We stayed on the beach the Haiyu Hotel. The hotel was reasonably good and quite inexpensive, less than 500 RMB a night with an ocean view and a great beachfront to explore. Qingdao has wonderful seafood, and if you like clams and basic fish, you can get it very inexpensively. The air was fresh, the sky was blue, and the ocean front was relatively clean and attractive, unlike the mud the occupies the region around Shanghai.

We began with a trip to Lao Shan Mountain, which features some good hiking and also beautiful fishing boats in the coastal city of Lao Shan. Then we visited a few parts of Qingdao such as Ba De Guan with lots of European architecture and the beautiful Zhongshan Park.

Travel tip: taxis can be hard to hail in Qingdao. During a time with lots of visitors, you would be wise to arrange a driver ahead of time. Might cost 400-500 per day. If you hire a taxi for a day, it might be more like 800 or higher. A subway system is under construction and should be up starting in 2015.

Here are some photos of our adventure.

Finding Yuan Fen on Lao Shan

Laoshan Tea Bushes: A Famous Tea from Shandong Province

Colorful fishing boats at Lao Shan village.

Fishing boats

Tea bushes at Lao Shan.

Smoke from the fires around Qingdao from people burning paper money for the Grave Sweeping holiday.

Fires accidentally set off from paper money burning.

Evening scene.

Beauty on the beach.

Workers move plants from a truck to the side of the road for planting as part of the massive horticultural exhibition in Qingdao

Preparing for the horticultural exhibition

On Mount Lao (Lao Shan)

A girl wanted to be photographed with my beautiful wife.

Der Rastkeller – good Western food under the Governor’s Mansion.

Lao She and his Rickshaw Boy at his former residence.

Rickshaw boy.

Wall around an art museum.

Zhongshan Park

Stiff photos under soft cherry blossoms.

More cherry blossoms.

Sun Yat Sen (Zhongshan)

A boy making faces for family photos.

Terrorist with a gun? No, it’s laser tag being played by a group at the park. Strange!

Stalking his enemy. I think a service at Zhongshan Park rents out laser tag. So strange to see people running around with machine guns.